7 October 2011

Thoughts on another by-election in a Royal Borough...

Norland voters in the other London Royal Borough voted to return another Conservative councillor today. I went along to help for a few hours and had a great time. The junior London Royal Borough is incredibly posh and I met my first housekeeper on the doorstep.

The Tories won - but with a massively reduced share of the vote.

Kensington and Chelsea used to be simple - it had 42 Conservative councillors and 13 Labour councillors. For ever.

They even taught Labour Sunderland how to count the votes so fast. Their returning officer counted the votes for the non Tory parties and then subtracted these from the total vote to get the Tory majority.

And that's how Sunderland still does it.

The problem is that it is the wrong way to count votes - accuracy is far more important than speed.

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